Thread Tools

In mid-2004, then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi learned something from a CIA briefing that made her blood boil. Pelosi reportedly "came unglued" at the revelation and had "strong words" with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, demanding that the CIA abandon its plans. As a result, a top-secret finding that President George W. Bush signed to authorize the CIA's activities was revised. Pelosi succeeded in stopping the agency from moving forward with the controversial operation....................................................

Why is this important? Because on May 14, 2009, Pelosi, now speaker of the House, declared in a Capitol Hill news conference that she had opposed CIA waterboarding but was powerless to stop it. A former senior intelligence official told me in 2009 that he was shocked by Pelosi's claim because, he said, "Speaker Pelosi herself has stopped covert action programs that she has been briefed on by going to the White House. In that very same time frame [after she learned about waterboarding]......................................

Pelosi was asked by a reporter, "Do you wish now that you had done more? Do you wish it had been your own letter?" Pelosi replied, "No, no, no, no, no, no . . . No letter or anything else is going to stop them from doing what they're going to do." She made this claim three times during the briefing. All the while knowing that her phone call to Rice in 2004 had stopped the CIA from "doing what they were going to do" in a different covert operation..........................................................................................

Journalists did not question Pelosi's claims -- and then they stopped questioning her. Pelosi announced that she would not take more questions on the topic, and the media complied. Reporters who relentlessly chased the Valerie Plame leak let the story drop. Pelosi's role in stopping another covert operation gives lie to her claims that she was powerless to stop waterboarding -- but the Washington press corps failed to "connect the dots." Now that the truth is out, will they continue to let her get away with not answering questions? We'll learn the answer at her next press briefing.

Marc A. Thiessen, a former speechwriter to President George W. Bush, is the author of "Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack."

I saw that but didn't want to hijack it so I started a new thread. What this two faced guy said and retracted has nothing to do with Pelosi's two faced behavior. I was pretty sure before Pelosi simply looked the other way and I'm even more convinced of it now. I think that she saw the mood of the country then and played dumb until the mood changed and she figured she could get some milage out of it. Sure that's speculation but as more comes out the more likely it seems to be the case.

Pelosi is the most useless politician we have, she's clueless and a total embarassment. Waterboarding and other enhanced techniques are critical to determine when someone is telling the truth. People like to say "you can't rely on information acquired through torture (enhanced techniques) because they'll say anything". The way it's generally used is to ask questions with known answers to see when the recipient is broken down enough to tell the truth. Once you're at that point you don't need the enhanced techniques anymore.

But we just read them their rights and let them stop talking now :bricks: